


we're like a thousand suns

by hellstrider



Series: Scars 'verse [5]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Arya Actually Uses Faces, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, DON'T WORRY it's not Jon or Tor, Episode: s08e03 The Long Night, Fix-It, M/M, Scars Verse, Sort Of, Sweet Sex, Violence, War, Wight Walkers - Freeform, arya is amazing, i live and breathe for arya and jon's beautiful sibling relationship, whew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 08:58:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19353718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellstrider/pseuds/hellstrider
Summary: "Winter has come, Jon Snow. Do not let it freeze your heart."





	we're like a thousand suns

**Author's Note:**

> the long night comes.
> 
> title from scars by tove lo.

“My name,” and here Jon pauses, throat too thick, tongue too heavy. “My _true_ … True name…”

He digs his teeth into his lip. The fist around his windpipe tightens. Perhaps it’ll finally do the job right and throttle the life from him when even a knife couldn't gouge it out.

“My true name.” It’s as if he’s swallowed stones. “Is Aegon Targaryen.”

_When this is over, I’ll tell you about your mother._

The tears don’t come. He’s too empty for it.

“My _mother_ – was Lyanna Stark,” he grates out. “And my father was – was never Eddard Stark. It was Rhaegar – Rhaegar Targaryen.”

_You’re still a Stark. You still share my blood._

A calloused palm cups his chin. Jon shuts his eyes tight as Tormund brushes a kiss over his brow, drawing him to the strength of his chest. For a handful of moments, Jon stays rigid, but then the wildling nuzzles into his temple and he chokes on a breath as he curls his hands into the thick brocade of his lover’s jerkin.

The crypt is silent as the dead within it. He stands before the statue of the man who he believed was his father and can’t meet the cool grey gaze of the woman that was his mother. The body beneath the stone was his mother, and he never knew.

_You know nothing, Jon Snow._

How much he wishes it were true.

“She’ll kill all of us if she knows,” Jon whispers tightly. “She’ll burn it all down, no matter how many crowns I put at her feet.”

“But?”

 _Rightful king,_ a treacherous little voice murmurs in his ear, _king of a dying land. Could you save it if you bled enough, Jon Snow?_

“Look at me,” Tormund commands firmly, and Jon does. “You do not owe them _any_ more than you’ve given, my little crow. I won’t let you put yourself to the ground for the fucking chair made of iron.”

Jon grits his teeth; before he can reply, however, the sound of a horn cuts through the night and his stomach lurches into his throat. Shouts ring through Winterfell and the swell of panic threatens to overwhelm him. Tormund ignores it in favor of drawing him close, knocking their foreheads together.

“This is too heavy for you to hold it,” the wildling says lowly. “Let me hold it for you, sweet thing. Let me hold it until the night ends. For now, the dead come, and winter comes with them.”

Jon breathes him in and shuts his eyes.

+++

He’d tasted like he was mourning already.

Jon had trembled against him, hands clutching at his shoulders, breath gusting harsh and quick against his teeth no matter how he tried to soothe him. Try as he might, Tormund couldn’t seem to gather him as close as he wanted, couldn’t pin him down and keep him right _there,_ suspended in a place where the world outside didn’t exist.

It had been an agonizing thing. Before the long night came, they had their last night, and it felt more like a fight than any battle that came before it ever had. Jon was restless with a secret he wouldn’t spit beneath his tongue and Tormund could only do so much to chase the fear away, the fear that rolled off Jon in waves so thick he could practically taste it.

Jon had kept that secret as they clung to one another, tried to leave the memory of one another across the surface of their souls so if one of them went to the ground, the other followed behind. Even as his little crow let the anger and the fear consume him, Tormund did not. He would keep it for him, tuck it under his heart and hold it. He would hold the world if Jon asked him to.

He’d drawn Jon up into his lap and let him take what he wanted, let him dig harsh hands into his spine and wring every last cry from him until his throat was raw and voice hoarse. Jon had told him he loved him, but it sounded like he hated him for it, and all Tormund could do was hold him until he turned away.

It wasn’t enough.

It would never have been enough, Tormund thinks, standing now before Winterfell as a darkness so black no fire could pierce it approaches. No amount of last moments would have been enough.

He’s grateful for it. It will be the strength behind his sword, the fire that can’t chase the night away but can burn through the dead and keep him breathing. That’s all he needs to do. Keep fighting, and keep breathing, so the moments that come after might even attempt to become enough.

Tormund looks to where Jon stands with his men, the men of the north rallying behind the king they chose. He looks grim as the day he’d risen from the dead, white skin gleaming in the firelight, so pale and so beautiful it steals the breath from his lungs. He imagines that white skin covered in the blood of victory, and his stomach blooms with heat.

Even now, at the edge of death, all he wants to taste is him.

Jon feels his gaze and looks towards him; for a moment, he’s almost vacant. But then – but then, his stare grows bold, and he lifts his chin. Tormund arches a brow in a silent question and Jon’s jaw tenses, eyes glinting with a familiar defiance.

It makes him feel like a god. Tormund grins, sharp as Ghost’s snarl, and while Jon doesn’t return it, he doesn’t look away either, until the sound of hooves clatters through the air as sharp as a whip, and a figure emerges from the dark.

He knows the Red Priestess was exiled, but Tormund can’t help but feel a sort of reverence when she emerges into the firelight. This is the woman that breathed life back into his lover, snatched Jon Snow from the hands of death. He owes her more than he could ever give. He owes her his very heart.

When the Dothraki screamers’ sickles ignite with her magic, so too does his spine with the fever of oncoming war. He grits his teeth against a growl and watches as Jon moves to meet the Red Woman, grim-faced and stoic. She looks down to him and her soft lips curve into a knowing, sorrowful smile.

“Winter has come, Jon Snow,” she says, and her voice is gentle but feels like a war drum. “Do not let it freeze your heart.”

Jon stands his ground a moment longer; then, wordlessly, he steps aside, and someone shouts to open the gates. The Red Priestess passes, and Tormund catches her fathomless gaze for just a moment – it pierces through to his core as keenly as Jon’s arrow had the night they raided Castle Black. She inclines her head, lips quirking, and then she’s gone, vanishing back behind the safety of Winterfell’s grey walls.

Part of him wishes she’d taken Jon Snow with her, but this is the long night, and even those walls will not keep it out.

+++

The fires go out almost as quickly as his life had drained from him and Jon’s mouth is utterly dry. He looks to the cliff side where he knows Daenerys waits with her dragons, can’t imagine the horror _she_ feels if he holds even half of it. The Dothraki’s screams go as silent as the grave and beside him, Ghost snarls and gnashes his teeth.

It all comes crumbling apart so quickly when Drogon’s piercing shriek rings through the sky, and the beast takes flight. Rhaegal soars up behind him and Jon watches in suspended horror as the remnants of the Dothraki come shooting out of the night. Ser Jorah comes with them, battered and wild-eyed, and Jon shuts his eyes as he thinks, _we just handed them another army._

The earth thunders, and so it begins.

Jon draws Longclaw, hand aching around the hilt. The dead come like an avalanche, inevitable and terrible and unthinking, blue-eyed and soulless, bloodless and ashen to the core.

They have dragons, but the night comes with far bigger fangs. Jon reaches out and puts a hand on Ghost’s back, drawing from the wolf’s strength. Ghost huddles up against his thigh and he looks down into those red eyes, cups the direwolf’s snout and for a moment sees only the little pup he’d picked up by the scruff in the woodland.

_An albino. This one will die quicker than the rest._

_No. This one is_ mine _._

“You keep to Tormund,” he orders thickly, and doesn’t care who hears him. Not now. “You keep to him, you hear me? Go!”

Ghost whines low, but a fission of clenching warmth suffuses Jon’s chest when the direwolf licks at his hand and seems almost to nod up against his palm. Then, his soul slips away, moving silent and swift over the ground, and Jon doesn’t look back. If he looks back now, he will be lost.    

Fire ignites the sky; Ser Brienne’s voice cuts above the thunder of the dead, ordering them to stand their ground. Time becomes a warped thing around him and Jon can _smell_ them, just like he could at Hardhome. The horrific, cloying stench of death, thick as tar but thinner than blood.

Jon shouts for his men to ready themselves, doesn’t hear his own voice. Somewhere, Tormund’s grating roar cuts through the night – and that’s the last thing Jon knows as the horde comes careening out of the pitch-black dark.

It is an unstoppable force striking against an immovable object. Jon cuts through bodies bled dry, through Crows and wildlings and northmen, through ancient bodies decayed down to muscle and grey sinew. Jon looks to the skies for a glimpse of rotten fire, but no spouts of blue cut through the haze. The Night King will come, Jon thinks fiercely, and he’ll be ready.

He’ll break that ice-ridden heart between his fucking _teeth_ if he has to. He bowed to the queen of fire so she would not burn through his kin, and he will rip apart the king of ice to keep him from Bran, from Winterfell, from Arya and Sansa and Tormund – that is, if Daenerys does not burn the man of ice to ash first.

So long as he is _finished,_ Jon thinks. He doesn’t care how.

The clamor of battle is broken apart by the roars of Daenerys’ children and when Drogon spits fire, Jon is blinded by it. He throws an arm up and shouts when a blade strikes it, not hard enough to cut through but enough to stagger him.

Their army spreads out, unfurling across the fire-soaked snow; Jon can hear Ghost’s yelping snarls, marks where Tormund is by it and keeps fucking breathing in ash. The dead part around him like a stone in the middle of a river, ripped through by his keen Valyrian blade.

There are too many. Too many, too quick. Jon watches northmen and wildlings hit the ground and he grinds ash and snow between his molars. He didn’t want to use the trench so soon, but they’ll have no other choice.

He nearly trips over a familiar face and lurches down to grasp Sam’s arm, hauling him up from the ground.

“ _Sam?_ Get behind the trench!” Jon roars, “ _go!”_

Poor Sam is white-faced, grip tight around an obsidian dagger but he holds it almost like one would a live fish. Edd hurtles out of the night to drag him back, and Jon twists to slam his blade through the skull of a former, rotted old Crow when it tries to follow the pair of them. The waves keep coming – hundreds of thousands of grey bodies, ashen corpses with blue eyes that burn hotter than the dragonfire.

“Get behind the trench!”

“ _Retreat to the trench!”_

“ _Jon!”_

He cuts through another dead thing and a back meets his own, fur-coated and strong.

“Your wolf won’t fucking let me breathe!” Tormund snarls, “you put him on me, Snow?”

“Aye,” Jon shouts, “he’ll keep his eyes on you for me!”

Ghost leaps through one of the dead, tearing through the cavern of its chest. Tormund roars and shatters another’s waist with a solid strike, sending one half shooting to the left and the other to the right. Jon grips his lover’s arm then and those wild blue eyes are brighter than the dragonfire Drogon shoots down.

“Get your men behind the trench!”

“You fucking go first!” Tormund grips his hand, the one wrapped around Longclaw. “No sense having magic steel if you’re not alive to shove it through their king’s fucking head, Snow!”

 Jon looks to the remaining men around them, torn between hurtling headlong into the night and falling back, the thick burn of cowardice making his tongue heavy. A swirling wave of frigid air blasts through them then, and Jon heaves through it, his lungs briefly capsizing in his chest. Tormund grips his arm as the blizzard rushes in, and through the clouds, Jon hears the piercing, warbling shriek of a dragon without a heartbeat.

“ _Jon_ ,” Tormund pleads, rough voice breaking through the ice of his chest.

Ghost plows through more of the undead and Jon barks his name, gesturing towards the trench as their men filter through the narrow gap between the wooden pikes. Ghost hesitates a moment, stubborn as Tormund, then yips and goes galloping off after a group of northmen.

“With me,” Jon roars to the men who will make it, and some that won’t; “ _with me!”_

“ _Wildlings!_ Behind the fucking pit! Go!”

Flaming arrows strike the wood and flicker out. Jon feels Tormund’s vicious string of curses more than he hears it – and then the gates groan open, and he looks around as Melisandre emerges, fearless and brilliant in her swirling robes, stained red with the blood of the innocents she sacrificed all for this.

She kneels down at the pyre, and when she utters the prayer, Jon’s soul surges forward to meet it.

+++

The flames ignite with a ferocity that makes Tormund’s gut flood with the battle-lust. This, he thinks fiercely, is the most holy kind of fire – fire from the woman that brought his man back, instead of the killing flames that threatened to take him away, the ones that threaten him still. The Red Woman rises, and Jon gently steers her towards Tormund.

“Get her back inside,” he orders, and Tormund doesn’t argue.

Her hand lights over his southern steel breastplate as they reach the gates, the one Jon gave him and insisted he wear, and he arches a brow down at her. One slender, pale hand comes up to fiddle with a lock of his hair, and her lips curve.

“You are kissed by the flames,” she says. “And now those flames have become a part of Jon Snow. The fire of the Lord of Light dwells within him, and the fire of his lover surrounds him. There is power in that, wildling. More than you could ever know.”  
            

And then she sweeps back through the gates, leaving a musky, heady scent behind her. Tormund watches her go with a fist in place of a heart until there’s a sharp thump behind him and a murmur ripples through their men.

One of the dead throws itself into the flames – then another. Savage horror rips through him as more move to follow, and Jon strides quickly to the break in their men, bellowing orders to draw and fire.

“ _Retreat to the keep!”_ his king roars; the dead surge forward as a single wave, and Tormund swears as he rushes through the stream of his own men to reach Jon.

A horrible, wrenching scream claps like thunder overhead and Tormund skids to a halt as icy-blue flames lance through the blizzard. Beneath his boots the earth _shakes_ as the grey undead beast of the king of ice collides in the distance with one of the dragon queen’s remaining children.

The force of it reminds him of a mountain capsizing. 

Tormund has seen undead mammoths, has seen the monstrous dead spiders of the far white north; the army of the dead carries with it direwolves and giants and stallions with rotting flanks but this – this is beyond anything he’s ever seen before. The dragons tangle in the most brutal kind of dance as the other soars circles nearby, unable to shoot flame for fear of hurting the wrong twin.

He shoves through the tangle of men as the undead stumble over the smothered ring of ash. Jon keeps shouting orders as the lines pour towards Winterfell, but Tormund thinks only of his king. Ghost slams into his thighs and the wolf snarls, tries to shove him back, and Tormund growls and gnashes his teeth right back. Those red eyes glint – Ghost’s maw is big enough to fit his entire head inside, but he knows the beast would never bite down.

“I’m going to him whether you like it or not, dog!” he roars, and Ghost, after pitching a furious whine, leaps towards where Jon’s voice cuts through the fray.

And then there’s a horrible sound of bone and sinew being ripped in two, and Tormund looks up as the dragon queen’s child plummets towards the earth like a fallen god as blue fire follows it down.

+++

Drogon goes in talons first for the dead Viserion in the distance. Jon heaves his sword through another dead face, and they’ve all become the same; ash and snow blend together as one, burning and freezing his lungs. The screams of his men, the screams of Drogon, the hissing of Viserion – it all blurs into a ravaging cacophony that makes his ears ache and the nape of his neck burn.

As the Unsullied’s last line breaks under the tide of undead, Jon finds himself adrift in a sea of grey and burning blue. He watches his fellow northerners fall, watches in horror as the dead pile at the walls and a massive undead giant goes hurtling through the gates.

All the tactics, all the strategy, all the planning in the world could not stop this, could not stop the fact that the Night King used dead things to fight, and they meant nothing. He could throw them over the fire as he pleased, send them careening down the sides of mountains, fling them into water – nothing but the blade could put them down.

Viserion and Drogon tangle in the sky, spurts of orange and blue crashing into a haze of white.

He turns from the horrific sight, Bran’s name beating against his ribs. The Night King came for the boy that was both his brother and was not anymore; if Rhaegal was so easily brought to ground, Drogon would not last long. Jon roars as he swipes through the dead, throat bloodied and throttled hoarse; he can’t hear Ghost at all now, doesn’t know where Tormund is and if he thinks too long on it, he’ll be made weak.

A keening cry that must be Rhaegal, wounded, shatters the air. This battle is unlike any before it, so brutal with noise and pain and sheer terror that Jon thinks he might never hear anything else but this ever again. Dragonsong is the worst thing he thinks he’s ever heard – it is keening and rippling and grating, like bone beneath rock, and Jon feels it down to the marrow.

Winterfell is surrounded by the dead, being covered by it. They topple over the walls on ladders built of their own, like ants on a hill, and it’s so grotesque it makes his stomach churn when he looks back towards the place that was supposed to be his home. Jon’s thoughts tear between his brother and the blue-eyed wildling lost somewhere in the midst of the battle.

_You’ll die when I let you, Jon Snow. And I’ll not die until you let me._

Wicked ice rushes over the ground. Jon feels it coming before he sees it, feels it all the way up his spine, right to his teeth. He turns away as the dead flood through his keep, taking with them the lives of wildlings, northmen, Unsullied – as they could be taking Tormund’s – and finds himself surrounded by wolves far colder than he could ever be.

            +++

“Fucking cold, cockless _cunts!”_

Tormund kicks a dead thing from his blade, teeth coated in ash and blood he isn’t sure is his own. Ghost snarls and snaps his maw at the dead that keep coming, their hideous clicking and hissing rasps putting permanent gooseflesh down his spine.

A rippling, reptilian howl rips through the air and Tormund watches as the last dragon, carrying its queen on its back, tears with horrible teeth into the wing of the grey undead beast. Tormund roars as the beast bellows, tasting Jon’s name at the back of his tongue like copper, and the battle-lust has turned into a thing that he can only call a demon deep in the pit of his belly.

One of the dead slams into him and Tormund staggers, bellowing in pain when gnarled, sharpened bone sinks into his thigh. He slams the pommel of his blade into the creature’s skull until it cracks, rotting brain sluicing out like ichor over his hand.

Arms tangle around his neck when a beast leaps onto his back and Tormund feels feral, swinging wildly at the dead as the thing on his back scrabbles at his chest with bony hands. Jagged, frigid teeth sink into his neck, sending hot blood gushing over his throat and he thinks of Jon, of never having enough time, of the way his face changes entirely when he smiles.

_If you’d been with me when it happened, you would’ve died with me._

_A good way to die._

The demon inside him raises its head; Tormund sinks fingers through softened flesh until he hits bone, and the undead thing’s spine becomes a whip in his hand as he wrenches it free.

            +++

The Wight shatters when Jon slings Longclaw into its throat, a strike that was sheer luck. The other five of the Night King’s weathered generals close in still, stepping over the remains of their fallen brother. Jon tightens his grip on his blade, bares his teeth, thinks of warm blue eyes and strong hands over his skin.

He will not fall – not to them and not to dragons, not when he has a world waiting for him to come back to. Jon twirls his sword and a fire he knows his aunt doesn’t have flares through him, chased by the ice of his resolve that he’s had since he came bleeding into his cursed inheritance.

Jon moves to meet the glacier-blade of the Wight, but before he can even get close, a dragonglass spearhead blooms from the center of the thing’s chest. It shatters, and a dead thing stares at Jon for a moment suspended out of time – and then, the telltale sigh of magic shudders through the air and his little sister arches a brow, dropping the face of death to the ground.

Arya twirls her spear with a grace Jon envies and admires in equal turns. She ducks under the swing of a ragged sword and Jon kicks himself into action, rushing to parry the blow of another Wight’s frozen steel. They fight with a swiftness that’s inhuman, but Jon has died and come back again too - and he, he thinks, he has far more to fight for than these vessels of vengeance.

“To your right!” Jon barks, and Arya hits the ground rolling, up before he can catch his breath. Her stave twirls and she shoves it through a Wight’s gut, eyes gleaming as the thing collapses.

It’s beyond anything he could ever describe, fighting side by side with his sister – with Arya, who was always so like him, who wore their father’s face and was different as Jon was. It was luck that Jon found Ghost first, he thinks, because he would have suited Arya just as much.

Braavos has been good to her, even if it made her suffer first. Deadly competence rolls off his little sister in droves. She’s bolder than their father was, smarter than Robb was, fiercer than Catelyn was. Arya was a wolf who became human, and so was Jon.

He shoves Longclaw through the second to last Wight as a wicked smack cracks the air. Arya’s cheek swells with blood and Jon tastes smoke as he roars her name, surging forward with a plummeting gut.

The Wight reaches for her, fists a hand in her hair, but his sister bares her teeth into a mockery of a grin and then there’s a flash of silver that gleams brighter than a star. Jon is moving even as Arya tosses a knife to her higher hand, and Valyrian steel sinks through iron and ice to bite the life from the lifeless.

“Seven _Hells –“_

Jon rushes to gather Arya up, ignoring her stiff arms pushing at him. He sweeps a hand over her cheek, feeling thick in the throat, and his little sister shoots him a wry smirk.

“The Red Witch said you might need help,” she says, in a tone one might use in discussing the fucking weather. “Looks like she was right.”

Fondness rushes through him. Before Jon can speak, however, a sound unlike any he’s ever heard before wrenches through the night air. It is a scream wrought with grief, with a memory of the thing still trapped under dead skin, a thing that still feels but shouldn’t.

Both he and Arya look up as Drogon rips into Viserion with savage teeth; when a figure weighed down by iron falls from the sky, Drogon dives down right after him. Viserion, wounded with wings raining black blood, crashes writhing into Winterfell’s eastern wall, and Jon’s heart lurches into his throat.

“Bran,” he says hoarsely to his sister, “you get to Bran.”

“And you?”

Jon meets Arya’s gaze with an equally grim one.

“I’m ending this,” he says, and his sister gives him an edged smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Good.” She unhooks her Valyrian steel knife from her belt then and shoves it into his hand. “Take this with you. It feels like it wants to go too.”

Then, she’s gone, moving quick through the battle and drawing Needle from her belt as she goes.

A lone wolf dies, but the pack survives; splintered his might have been, but Jon carries them still as he turns towards the bloom of fire deep in the mire of the dead.

            +++

Tormund catches his breath and holds it in his teeth as the dead clamber up the wings of Daenerys’ dragon, scrabbling up his tail as he swings and gnashes his maw. The white queen hits the ground and he’s running before he can think twice, Ghost at his heels.

The dead clamor around him and Tormund roars, swinging wildly as the king of ice slowly approaches Daenerys; then, there’s another shout, a ragged one, tired and strung out, and the white queen’s knight comes hurdling out of the dark.

Tormund barks a swift, _“don’t!”_ that is lost to the clamor around him as the knight raises his blade – and he watches it shatter against the Night King’s glacier-steel, watches as that glacier-steel bites through the bear-knight’s armor and Daenerys _screams._

The Night King yanks his sword from the bear-knight’s gut, and Daenerys looks like a child, so fucking young as she scrabbles back over the ground with tears on her face. Her knight sags to the ground, blood dripping from his lips, and Tormund snarls as he rips a dry throat apart with a crushing hand.

The white queen’s dragon, at the end, is just a beast; his piercing cries break the night and then he’s taking flight, abandoning his mother to the mercy of the dead. It is a wicked thing to do, as the dead don’t know what mercy is, and Tormund grits his teeth when a blue hand closes around the throat of the dragon queen.

He lurches against bony arms. Daenerys, stripped of her power and fire, is barely old enough to understand war, and her face gleams as the king of ice raises her towards the sky. The crunch of bone and snap of sinew makes Tormund’s mouth go sour and he bellows even as the fire fades in the dragon queen’s eyes, her body crumpling to the blood-soaked ground.

And then piercing blue eyes are turning to him, and Tormund bares his teeth. He draws the dragonglass dagger from his belt as the king of ice regards him with an almost fascinated gleam in his cruel gaze. He rips the jaw from one of the king’s dead, shoves his knife through a gut and sheds black ichor over the snow.

If he is to die, he’ll die like he came into the world, with a fight under his heart and blood coating his skin. His heartbeat follows a cadence of the last name he’ll have on his tongue and the dead circle like wolves around their master. To face this king – it’s all of his life before him, Tormund thinks; until now, he’s been some vague shape in the distance, an idea more than a reality.

Here, now, he’s facing down the phantom that has been the sole cause of his and his people’s suffering. The Crows might have plagued them like the winter-sickness but the walkers – the walkers were endless, a tide they could never stem. No dam could keep them at bay, not even the great and mighty wall.

It is the devil that stares at him now. It is death.

_Could you fight death, wildling?_

_Could you win?_

Ghost shrieks and whines, the sound of pain. A knife bites into Tormund’s shoulder and still he fights, roaring with a rage that he’s never before felt as he slams his elbow back into a throat.

He thinks of warm eyes, warmer than dragonfire. He thinks of the white and the wild, of the way Jon’s hair shone like a raven’s wing beneath the grey sunlight. He thinks of him lain out on that fucking table, bloodied wounds still weeping as the Red Woman passed her hands over him and pleaded with her god.

He thinks of Jon, laid out beneath him across soft furs with the shape of his teeth over the scar of his sacrifice, and his body floods with fire.

_There is power in that, wildling._

He thinks of Jon Snow, who shot him through and then kept the heart he found underneath, and surges into the cold.

            +++

The Night King has Tormund on his knees and Jon sees in shades of blood. Ghost lies on his side, unmoving, and his wildling has a blue hand in his hair and defiance painting his face, defiance that seems to amuse the Night King.

Jon moves without thinking, without feeling the earth pass beneath his boots. He grips Longclaw as tight as he can, and the Night King raises his placid face as he nears with a savage battle-cry spilling from his lips.

The clash of ice-steel to Valyrian breaks the night in two. For Jon, this is the moment – the moment that divides and defines his entire life to that point. From that moment there is only the _before_ , and now there is only _after_ , and Jon will do anything it takes to see it.

The Night King twists away from him with quick feet, moves just as inhumanly quick as his generals had. Jon thinks he should be exhausted, thinks he should be weak by now, but all he feels is heat. All he knows is the burn of blue eyes through him, both cold and warm, one fiercely alive and one a mere mockery of it.

A pool of silver hair catches his eye, and Jon’s chest clenches tight to see Daenerys so still, her eyes staring unseeing up at the hazy sky. Where her dragons are, he doesn’t know; he doesn’t have it in him to consider it.

He would speak, if he thought it might matter. If, perhaps, he thought his tongue would even cooperate. Jon puts himself between his wildling and the Night King, just as he put himself between Tormund and Daenerys.

As he set down his crown, he lifts his blade, the blade he put to the name of the dragon queen so it might defend his siblings from her – now, it will defend them from the reach of ice as well as fire.

It’s not like any fight he’s ever faced. The Night King must have once been a keen swordsman; his strikes are rapid and pristine, controlled in a way Jon never was able to grasp. The cold steel cuts through Jon’s arm and he bites back the pain, gripping Longclaw ever tighter as memories unfurl down his spine.

_Stick ‘em with the pointy end._

Jon parries a swift blow, twists and puts his weight behind the blessed steel, lets it become an extension of his own body.

_You’re still a Stark. Still of my blood._

The Night King advances on him, hummingbird fast, and around them the dead begin to stir and rise.

_Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Kill the boy, and let the man be born._

Daenerys’ eyes shine blue. Tormund, crouched protectively over Ghost, bares his teeth.

_You have so very much to lose, Jon Snow._

All of it – from the moment he set foot on the wall to the moment he touched death, has been for this. From the moment he turned from the dark to emerge into the light again, it has been for this. The dead surge forward and commit the gravest mistake he thinks they could when they surround Tormund and Ghost. It’s meant to weaken him, meant to gouge through him and turn him from the fight.

But Jon was born a wolf, and he feels it when he leans into the madness of the dragon. A wrenching roar all but strips his skin from him as Tormund fights the best he can, and Jon thinks something inside him turns to wildfire. It melts like liquid brass over his bones and turns his chest into a maelstrom, thundering with a song he can only equate to the perfect marriage of snow and flames all at once.

_Winter has come, Jon Snow. Do not let it freeze your heart._

Some holy thing grips him as he strikes out at the Night King until the creature is put on the defensive, made desperate by it. Jon felt a fraction of this, just once, when he was facing down Ramsay Bolton at the end of an impossible battle, and for so long Jon has been a champion of the impossible. He swells with that now, ignoring the ache in his thighs, in his hands.

The Night King feigns to the left and goes right. Jon barely manages to skate under a deadly blow, but Longclaw wavers and it’s only two more easy parries before his sword flies from his weakening grasp. A fist of ice slams into Jon’s jaw and he spits blood, grunting when a foot connects with his chest and he hits the ground.

Tormund’s cries are growing scattered and fainter now, and Jon is shaking apart with the beast in his chest. Jon rolls when the Night King brings his sword down into the dirt, head spinning, and he lurches back to his feet with a phantom of fangs gnashing over his teeth.

He leaves Longclaw where it fell. The Night King swings at him with a lazy elegance and Jon weaves through the strikes like it’s some kind of dance. He nearly bites through his tongue and bides his time, praying silent and pleading for Tormund to hold on – just a little longer, he thinks wildly, _just a little_ –  
           

The earth trembles for the hundredth time, and Jon looks up as a river of fire opens over the ground, consuming half the dead that surround Tormund and Ghost. Rhaegal looks horrible, one wing torn and his throat bloodied, but the dragon is still his own stampede as he shoves through the clamoring corpses with a trilling shriek that turns Jon’s blood.  

Jon meets a pair of warm blue eyes, blue as the sea. Ghost, one ear missing and white snout bloodied, stands beside where Tormund kneels, and they’re both filthy and wounded but they’re alive. Jon’s lip curls with a snarl Rhaegal puts sound to as he tears through the dead.

The Night King swipes and Jon ducks low, hand going to the hilt at his back. He can’t get greedy, not now; the weight of thousands of years gathers behind him and the moment will come, he knows it will. It’s been waiting too long not to. The moment will be the hero that saves them – Jon is merely the hand that will guide it forth.

And then the Night King, impatient and tempestuous, moves to swing wide, and the _moment_ slams full force into Jon’s spine. He draws the dagger Arya put in his hands and moves like a viper, a growling bellow gathering in his throat. The Night King brings his blade down while Jon shoves his upwards, and the world catches its breath.

Time compresses in, becomes a heartbeat of a thing, and Jon can barely feel his own body as the one under his hands goes utterly still.

+++

The silence is a product of sheer disbelief, he thinks. As soon as the Night King shattered with a shriek like a banshee, his army went to ground faster than if they’d been burnt by the dragon’s fire. Tormund sags against Ghost for a moment, fingers curling into the wolf’s fur as the army of the dead is swept away, swept away as if they’d never existed at all.

The army of the dead is gone, and Jon Snow stands in a ring of bodies with a steel knife in one hand and the other closing around air where the king of ice once stood. He has blood streaking down his face and gore on his chest but he’s alive – he’s _alive_.

Tormund puts his own pain aside and pushes stubbornly to his feet. He catches the hand Jon curls around nothing, drags it to his chest instead and the little crow’s eyes flicker up with a soft, hitching gasp.

“Where are you?” he whispers hoarsely, throat aching and rubbed raw. “Come back to me now, little crow.”

“It’s _over,”_ Jon manages thickly. “It’s all over.”

The words pulse through him with a life of their own.

“Aye, my sweet thing.” Tormund draws him close, curling a hand around his nape. “It’s over.”

A fine keening rises then, and a shadow passes overhead as the bigger of the two remaining dragons lands. The littler of the pair noses at its dead mother, the white queen, fallen across the ground like snow. Jon’s breath catches, and Tormund holds him fast where he stands as the bigger dragon lifts his head and gives a wail so heart-wrenching it brings tears even to his eyes.

And then they’re taking to the sky, and the white queen goes with them, cradled in a careful claw. Jon’s brow creases deep while they watch them fade over the grey horizon, touched with the first rays of a new dawn.

Tormund sidles to where the queen’s bear-knight lies and kneels down with a grimace. His lined face is white, but when he checks for a pulse he finds one – weak, so very weak, but his old heart still beats.

“He’s alive,” Tormund grunts, and Jon moves to help him heave the bear-knight from the ground. Their men begin to pick their way forward, creeping across the churned ground like startled deer to check for any signs of life, though Tormund doesn’t think they’ll find much.

It’s a grim pilgrimage, the trek back to the keep. The battlefield is so red Tormund doesn’t think the earth will ever quite recover – at least, not until long after they’re long put beneath it. It reeks of death and smoke, of impossible loss and of newborn hope.

Unsullied and northmen, wildlings and Vale-knights all linger amongst the ruin, all of them looking vaguely stunned and beyond ragged. A low energy radiates from Jon, one that permeates the air and grows thick over Tormund’s tongue.

The bear-knight groans between them, and he can’t believe he’s still alive. He’s seen the glacier-steel eat through flesh and bone like the festering disease. Perhaps that eating ice was stayed, driven away when the source of its vitriol died.

As the dawn spills over the tattered field, a figure in red emerges from the gates and together they slow to a halt; Tormund glances towards Jon, who watches the figure of fire move like he can’t quite decide if he wants to see her head roll or not.

The Red Woman drops something in the snow as she strides with a weary purpose out into the graveyard, eyes affixed into a beyond they can’t see. Her hair turns from red to grey to white, and Tormund watches with a strange grief as she withers away beneath her red, red robes.

The Red Woman crumples down to her knees and turns to ash, swept away by a gentle wind coming tumbling over the mountains.

Jon lets out a low, trembling breath, and a familiar, steely pair of eyes catches Tormund’s gaze across the crimson field. Davos moves to meet them, gruff and grim as ever, and he takes the bear-knight from them with an ease belying the years he wears. Jon grunts, grasping an injury in his arm Tormund can’t see, and he moves in close to cup his chin, wanting to touch him if only for a moment.

The little crow shuts his eyes. He leans into Tormund’s touch, and for a blessed moment, the world is theirs and theirs alone. He nudges Jon’s brow with his nose, breathes in the heat of his skin beneath the blood and the grit, and it somewhat calms the red-eyed beast dwelling in his belly that knows only Jon’s name.

 But there are people still yet to find, healing yet to start, and so after only a moment, Tormund lets him go and moves to follow him towards the gates.

It’s not enough, but he’s alive.

He’s alive, and they have time – much as he wants to drag Jon into the nearest cove and paint bruises over his chest, they have time. He’s _alive,_ Tormund thinks fiercely, and his bones tremble with a need that he’s only ever felt when it came to the little crow. A need to fight him, a need to have him, a need to keep him; it all comes tumbling through and his chest is full of wool as they pass beneath the gates of Winterfell.

The silence inside the keep is deafening in only the way something housing the dead can be. Tormund slides a hand up Jon’s back and the little crow sways close but holds his ground as dozens of pairs of eyes swivel around to land over them.

And then – and then, the silence breaks, splintered by the one name Tormund was absolutely certain would be his last word.

“Jon?”

+++

The moment Jon embraces Sam, the savage spell crushing them into silence seems to break. A whooping roar rushes through the men, started by the wildlings, and someone shouts for healers as the raucous business of the aftermath begins. It’s flush with life even through the pain that still plagues them, flush with a hope that moves like a river, carrying him with it.

Jon pulls away from Sam as the doors of the crypts open and a head of red hair appears. Sansa looks harried and wild around the eyes, but she’s alive, and when Jon starts for her she rushes to him, heedless of the blood painting his chest and face as she throws her arms around his neck.

“Jon,” Tormund calls softly then, and both he and Sansa look ‘round as two figures appear in the cavernous tunnel of stone leading into the Godswood.

Not two – three figures, Jon realizes numbly, with a head so light he thinks he might faint; three, two standing, one seated, whole and hugely untouched. Sansa chokes on a breath and pulls away, gripping her skirts as she runs to throw her arms this time around Theon Greyjoy; Jon does his best to swallow down his distain when his sister lets out a peal of genuine, if not slightly hysterical laughter.

Across the courtyard he meets Arya’s fierce gaze where she stands behind Bran’s wheelchair. Jon reaches back for the knife that carried the moment that saved them all, and when he lifts it, his sister’s lips curl into a satisfied, lupine smile.

+++

He thinks he’s about to shed his own fucking skin as he follows Jon through the Great Hall. They’ve been here before, he thinks, been like _this_ in this damned cathedral of a hall before. Never again – never again, he vows as he follows the pull of his little crow, hooks sunk through his spine. His need has transformed inside him, become a feral thing that wants to bury itself inside Jon and never come back out.

He just fucking might.

They come upon Davos in the corridor leading to the apartments; the irritation he feels must show on his face, because Davos arches a brow and his mouth twitches under his beard.

“Mormont says the Night King killed our queen,” Davos says after a beat. “He’ll make it. But he wishes he wouldn’t.”

“There’s no body to bury,” Jon rasps. “The dragons took her.”

Davos frowns. “Where?”

“Old Valyria? Back to Vaes Dothrak? Who knows.”

The little crow shakes his head, rubbing his brow, and Tormund nearly growls when Davos seems about to ask something else. The old smuggler eyes him, takes in Jon’s sorry state, then shuts his mouth with a click.

“I’ll send someone to draw a bath,” he says wisely, and Jon utters a soft _thank you._

Once Davos is gone, Jon slumps back against the wall, and Tormund moves between his little crow and the dark corridor. He puts himself between Jon Snow and the world, where he always fucking belonged, and Jon’s hands slide up into the tacky fur of the long southern vestment hung over his leather and metal jerkin.

The thick energy buzzing through Jon hits him in full when the little crow lifts his chin in that sly, pleading way he does, the way that makes Tormund’s blood boil and his cock ache. He’s got blood on his face and his lips are chapped and raw, but Tormund has never wanted to feel him more than he does in that moment.  

“Someone could see,” Jon breathes, but they’re already trading air and Tormund growls as he seals their mouths together.

It’s smoke and blood and fire, ice and winter. It’s desperate, more desperate than the fight for his own fucking life was, because Jon is here and he’s real, he’s still full of soul beneath his beautiful white skin and all Tormund wants to do is bite at him until he tastes it.

He pulls his glove free before tangling a hand into Jon’s hair, and the little crow gasps when he drags him out of the corridor and into the shadow of a smaller hallway, where the dark will keep them long enough.

Tormund crowds him against the wall as the red-eyed beast overwhelms him, changes him from a man to the wild thing that they’re right to think he is. Jon’s hips strain into his own, frantic hands burrowing under Tormund’s jerkin to find the lacing of his breeches, and he groans thickly against the wildling’s teeth when he finds him already hard.

Tormund practically rips the buckle of Jon’s trousers open, snarls low against his throat as he takes them in one hand and it’s awkward and too dry but they’re both beyond aching for it, and Jon utters his name with a rapture that makes his gut clench.

He shoves Jon back to the stone and ruts into him and Jon slides his arms around his neck, digs harsh fingers through his hair and drags him down for a kiss that’s all teeth as the slide and smack of skin on skin echoes off the low-ceilinged hallway.

Jon unravels so quickly, quickly as he ever does under his hands and he groans his undoing against Tormund’s lips, sending fissions of impossible heat down his spine. He ruts through the slickness on Jon’s hip and has to bite into his throat to stop a shout when he empties himself, his self-control beyond frayed.

“Not fucking letting you out of your room,” Tormund says in his ear, “for _weeks.”_

“ _Our_ room.”

Jon’s lips are sticky against his own, too dry, and he loves the way his kiss clings. Tormund splays his hand over his jaw, thumb under his chin to keep it lifted high, and Jon’s eyes flutter shut as he noses over his bloodied cheek.

“Don’t want anyone touching you. Don’t want anyone fucking _looking_ at you.”

“I told you to keep me, didn’t I?”

It thrills him, makes him want to roar and rip through flesh – though he supposes he’s done enough of that for a time. Instead, he’ll gather Jon beneath him and hold him there. He’ll gather his wounded skin and he’ll soothe it, will put his brutal, ripping hands and teeth to healing.

“Aye,” he rasps, cock already stirring again, “you did, little crow. And so I will.”

+++

The water burns through Jon when he sinks down into it, helped and guided by Tormund’s strong hands. A needle and thread sit beside the bath with the salves and the oils; a healer had been waiting, and Tormund had sent him away with a growl and a narrow glare. Normally Jon might protest – he might protest the blatant show of their cohabitation, though he supposes it doesn’t matter. Not anymore.

Let them come, he thinks viciously, so tired he no longer has proper boundaries; let them come and take his wildling on if they feel so offended by it. They survived dragons together – they survived the _Night King_ ; he’s no doubt they could survive anything else the world tried to throw at them.

Jon leans lazily against the edge of the bath and reaches up to run tired, sudsy fingers through Tormund’s red hair. The wildling, stood between his legs, kisses over his collarbone and wipes the grit away from his skin with hands and a soft linen, starting with his face and then moving to the cut on his bicep.

It’s become a ritual of theirs, tending to one another in the stumbling aftermath of battle. Jon revels in it, holds these moments so close; they got him through the darkest night, got him back on his feet when he was brought to his knees. He gazes up at his wildling and thinks he does believe in something higher now, now that they’re both here together.

Together, against all odds – together, at the other end of a war of the dead. Jon believes in the gods now, the old and the new, because the proof of their protection and their rare mercy is pulling him back together with hands built for breaking. Jon splays a hand over Tormund’s chest, right over the swell of his heart, and when the tears come he doesn’t try to hold them back.

“It’ll be over soon,” Tormund soothes, thinking the tears are from the needle he uses to mend his skin, and Jon’s lips curve as he curls his fingers into the thick tangle of his beard.

“I love you,” Jon says then, and he knows he doesn’t say it enough. “I love you.”

There’s no amount of times that he could that would be enough. The wildling’s sharp face softens, and he bends down to brush his lips over his brow, over his cheek, over his mouth. Jon ignores the dull pain in his bicep and cranes his neck, deepening the kiss until Tormund is pressed fully against him, cock hard against Jon’s hip.

“Need to finish sewing you back together before I take you apart, little crow,” the wildling growls. “Sweet thing. Let me put you right. Then I’ll show you what this love makes of me, aye?”

Jon’s chest swells. He settles back against the side of the bath and doesn’t feel the burn and pull of the needle. Adrenaline of a different sort rushes through his belly, the ember of his desire sparking up his spine until he can think of nothing else but the way those calloused palms feel passing over his skin.

When it’s his wildling’s turn to be put right, Jon pushes him down to the stone bench beneath the water and slides over his thighs, careful of the shallow wound over one leg. Tormund growls and hauls him close, heedless of the pain, and it makes Jon’s heart lurch.

The wildling bears less wounds than he thought he might, bruises molting his arms and bulky torso. He’s got a small wound over the sweeping bridge of his nose and a gash in his brow, but they won’t need thread.

There’s a bite on his throat that Jon wants to lick over, and a shallow stab wound in his shoulder; Jon starts with cleaning the marks of a dead thing’s teeth over his lover’s skin.

“Not going to be able to stitch you up if you keep on like that,” he admonishes as Tormund sweeps his hands over his back over and over, from ass to shoulder-blades. The wildling passes his mouth over his chest, biting gently as he goes, and Jon sucks in his cheek in an attempt to stay a groan when Tormund rolls his hips up into him.

“It can wait.”

“Let me clean them, at least. I’ll be furious if you fall to some fucking fever after all this.”

“I’ve had far worse, little crow.”

“You didn’t have me then.” Jon catches his beard in a tight grip and Tormund gives a playing growl. “You’ll let me do this. Then you can take me.”

One brow arches, white teeth flashing in clear amusement, but his blue eyes gleam with a proud fondness that makes Jon feel strong and weak all at once.

“An order, little King Crow?”

Jon can’t stop the smile that pulls at his lips. “If you like,” he replies, and Tormund laughs, thunder coated in velvet.

He’s meticulous as he stitches up the bite on Tormund’s throat, and to his surprise, his wildling stays perfectly still as he works. Perhaps he can sense his nerves – he can read him better than he can read himself, most of the time. He’d not be shocked if he could smell the anxiety as he works.

However, once the throat stitches are done, Tormund hauls Jon close and nips at his jaw. Jon huffs and splays a hand over the shallow stab wound in the meat of his shoulder if only to remind him of it, but his wildling doesn’t even flinch.

“ _Tor_ ,” Jon starts; “you burned brighter than dragonfire when you stood against the king of ice, Jon Snow,” and it’s Tormund’s tone that stays his protests. His voice is rich in a way Jon’s only heard once before, when he came back from the dark and found Tormund waiting.

“You became more than a man. I wanted to stay down on my knees, and I’ve never fucking bent to anyone before. You could put me on my fucking knees, sweet thing, and I’d thank you for it.”

Jon sways back. Reverence lines those bright blue eyes, and Jon is flush with it, feels it burn down to the core of him. He slides his hands through Tormund’s hair and the wildling clutches at his ass, hard enough to leave bruises.

 _This is mine,_ he thinks fiercely, bowing his head to steal the air from Tormund’s lungs, breath he gives and gives. This wild thing, who is loyal and so earnest it hurts; this wild thing, who laughs like thunder and knows how to make Jon laugh in turn. This wild thing, who pulled Jon out of the dark by the scruff of his neck and reminded him of the wolf he was meant to be.

“I want to feel you,” he murmurs, a command and a plea all in one. “Let me feel you.”

Tormund hauls him up with a triumphant, whooping laugh that Jon greedily swallows down. The wildling presses him down to the stone beside the bath, the cold and brutal stone in place of furs, and if Jon’s being honest he could imagine nothing softer beneath him for this.

They’ve survived the impossible and Jon wants to feel the memory of their victory more than he feels the wounds that tried to stop it. Tormund’s teeth worry bruise after bruise down his throat and Jon arches when he reaches his belly, tongue laving over the scars there with a kind of determination that makes him think he’s memorizing every jagged line.

And he is. Each moment Tormund spends pouring over him is nothing short of devotional, nothing short of ritual and worship. Jon catches a throaty cry behind his teeth when wet heat envelops him, and the wildling hums, a wordless command that he heeds with the next keen that comes pouring from his lips.

The wildling takes him down like a man starved for it. Jon’s hips strain and Tormund lets them, hauls him close by his thighs and swallows tight around him until Jon is dizzy with it, muscles twitching as he tries to stave off the onslaught of pleasure. He wants it to last, wants to be taken apart and remade piece by piece, because this is the only war he could ever let ruin him like that.

“Tor,” he utters, the name punching from his gut, “Tor – wait, want you – want to, with you –“

Tormund pulls off his cock with a slick, obscene pop and Jon has to squeeze his eyes shut to keep from spilling over his belly. Teeth scrape over the inside of his thighs and the wildling growls, low and beyond pleased.

“You’re not going to be able to stand, sweet thing,” he croons. “I meant it when I said I didn’t want to let you out of this fucking room. Not until the only heat you know is the heat I make you feel.”

The words sear through him and he thinks if anyone could replace the burning nightmares of war with those of the battle of skin on skin, it would be Tormund. Jon bites his lip and writhes up on the stone as more bruises are tattooed to his thighs, and then there’s a mouth at his hip and a pop of a cork that makes his stomach lurch.

It’s always a delicate, beautiful kind of torture when the wildling eases him open. He does it with the kind of dedication any artisan might use when it comes to their craft, alternating between soft strokes to the spot that make him want to weep and spreading caresses that have him gasping his name and digging his heels into the stone.

“That’s it,” Tormund murmurs, and Jon thinks he must be burning alive, “that’s it. You’re so good for me, sweet thing. I wish you could hear the way you beg for me. Wish you knew how fucking good you look like this.”

And then the wildling is over him, and Jon has something to hold onto as he sinks into him to the hilt, flooding him with heat and a fullness that he feels in his throat. Jon sighs with the sheer relief of it, arching up as those calloused hands slide up his ribs and he tangles his fingers into Tormund’s thick hair to keep him close.

But then he’s being hauled upright, and Tormund is seated so deep like this that Jon cries out with it, gasping through the fissions of sharp pleasure shooting up his spine. The wildling brings Jon over his bent thighs and grins like a wolf, catching his chin in his hand as he rolls his hips up into him, slow and swirling.

“A crownless king,” Tormund says against his lips, “but not one without a throne.”

It should be _ridiculous_ , but it isn’t, and Jon burns red-hot as he rises up and sinks back down over the wildling, too damned tired to be anything other than greedy. His cock is weeping all over him and he needs to feel the wildling more than he’s needed anything, so he rolls his hips until Tormund takes them between his huge hands and slams up into him.

He hits that spot inside him every time like this, and Jon is quickly lost to the inferno. Rapturous lips move over his chest and Jon thinks that this is what saved him – the thought that he’d never feel this again, the horror at the idea that he might never be beneath those hands, that mouth ever again.

The keens and throaty moans fall from him without abandon and Jon leans back, feeling beyond free as he curls his hands over Tormund’s shoulders. Here, he is not Aegon Targaryen or the bastard of Winterfell; he belongs to Tormund and Tormund alone, and in the wildling’s hands, Jon Snow becomes the man he thinks he was always supposed to be.

“That’s it,” his wildling croons, pride lacing his voice, and Jon’s cock jumps against his belly; “that’s it, sweet thing. Let me hear you. Let me hear what I do to you. Tell me how this cock feels, Jon Snow. Tell me why you keep crawling back.”

“You’re the best – _fucking thing_ I’ve ever felt,” Jon groans, curling his fingers into the wildling’s beard to keep himself upright. “And I – _love you –“_

A rough hand fists into his hair, but Tormund’s tongue is soothing over his throat. He thinks he’s about to unravel entirely, from the core to the last layer of his skin, and it’ll be the most incredible thing when he does.

“Good,” he growls, “you’re _mine,_ sweet thing. _Mine.”_

“Say – it.” He clenches around Tormund and the wildling snarls, groaning thick and deep in the barrel of his chest. “ _Say it.”_

Tormund’s teeth dig into his ear and Jon’s hips stutter, his cock oozing heat, and when he all but purrs, “ _I love you, Jon Snow_ ,” it’s all it takes. Jon comes undone with a rasping hiss of Tormund’s name, pleasure searing up to his throat as the wildling thrusts hard and quick into him, fucking him through it and past it.

He wants to bottle the sound of his wildling hitting his peak, wants to hear it until it’s all he knows. Jon clenches his hips with his trembling thighs, sore with the battle and the weight he’s beginning to shed from his shoulders, and Tormund bows over him, murmuring his name as his hips stutter through the aftershocks.

“Tell me it’ll always be like this.”

His voice is weak, but the command is strong, and Tormund laughs low and quiet as he nuzzles over Jon’s temple.

“Sometimes it’ll be better,” the wildling says, the words a low burr, “sometimes worse. But it’ll always be ours, and I’ll always be yours, Jon Snow.”

It makes him want to weep, but he doesn’t. It makes him want to weep, but it also makes him want to laugh, because now – because now, the world opens before him and all he sees is the house in the forest Tormund promised to build.

All he sees is the house, with its thatched roof and its big hearth and bigger bed, piled with mammoth skins and wolf fur. He sees Tormund fresh from the cold, snow in his hair and nose pink; he sees Ghost running wild and unburdened, sees himself in sealskins and wrapped in Tormund’s arms until time itself becomes undone.

All he sees is the freedom they took back, the freedom he’ll keep between his teeth. Aegon Targaryen is a phantom that died when Lyanna Stark did; Jon Snow he was born, and Jon Snow he remains. Tormund held the weight of that name and stripped it bare, and now Jon is free.

“And I asked you to keep me,” Jon says, as the fight flees him and leaves behind the man the boy died to bring to life. “And I meant it.”

The sun rises outside their room and Jon keeps a piece of it for himself, keeps the piece of sunlight that was trapped in a wildling with sea-blue eyes and fire for hair; the wildling that buried himself beneath his skin and became the armor not even death could cut through.

Winter came and they chased it away, and now, they can dream of a gentler spring.

**Author's Note:**

> i have Plans for arya in this verse. my light. my life. i love my murder daughter so much oof


End file.
